Witches and BastardsAn Imperial Wizard and a Prescription for
Anti-Imperialismby Lila Rajiva
www.dissidentvoice.org
July 11, 2005

Now
that we've learned from yet another posthumous tape what “Tricky Dick”
Nixon thought of assassinated Indian PM Indira Gandhi (old witch) and her
billion-odd compatriots (devious bastards), I find myself in a bit of a
dilemma. As an Indian immigrant, I feel -- vaguely -- that I ought to be
insulted. But I'm not. Instead I'm actually a little disappointed with
this rather paltry display of verbal fire-power from a man whom I, like
many others growing up in the third world, considered a villain of classic
magnitude. Who can forget that cartoon of the Seventh Fleet chugging
menacingly into the Indian Ocean while the Indian army was trying to end
the whole-sale massacre of East Pakistanis by the West Pakistan army? It
was one of the few modern wars that met the stringent definition of a just
war and Nixon's interference was greeted with universal scorn in India. R.
K. Lakshman, the nonpareil of Indian political cartoonists, incarnated him
as a scowling whale, “Mopy Dick,” (or was it “Morbid Dick”?) spouting off
in a corner of the Pacific and anxiously eyeing the progress of his buddy,
the blood-drenched General Yahya Khan.

And now we're
bastards. Weak stuff. Down under, in the land of sheilas and billabongs,
they might mistake that for a compliment, a “bastard” being more comic
there than insulting, and in come circumstances, downright complimentary.
But at any rate, good or bad, it's fairly inaccurate. Indians are not
bastards in anything approaching the same numbers as Americans, fully a
third of whom are born to unwed mothers, if we are to believe Family
Research Council numbers. Indians may do better at infanticide or female
feticide, at dowry deaths or some other domestic sport, but they are
definitely behind in bastardy, as are most countries when compared to the
West, although given a generation or two of imperial influence this might
change...

As for Indira
Gandhi, with that two-tone mane, there's no doubt she was the Asian answer
to Cruella DeVil. But frankly, it's a look I don't dislike. Of course, I
may be prejudiced, since when I gaze into the mirror I see the same racial
signature, the shadows under the eyes, the thick eyebrows. Witches don't
have retrousse noses and wispy brows. Old witches, anyway. But despite
this superficial purchase, as an insult, witch is rather weak since the
dark sisterhood has been making a nice comeback all over the globe for
several decades now. Legions of radical feminists, earth-lovers,
traditionalists, Euro-revivalists, pagans, medievalists, spiritualists,
occultists, and neo-Orientalists pay obeisance in one way or other to the
goddess and her coven of priestesses. Even dialectical materialists like
to dig up the witchcraft trials and persecutions of the early modern era
as the last nail in the coffin of the ancient communitarian world of the
goddess and an early and deadly crime of patriarchic capitalism. Witches
are now the star turn in every kind of entertainment -- from Samantha on
TV’s “Bewitched” to Morgan LeFay in King Arthur.

Now there you have
two witches who don't fit the long-nosed, hirsute stereotype. But notice
that they're young and not old. Blonde, kitten-faced, and youthful, on
them the black hat and broom simply become kinky appurtenances, for
Witchcraft itself is always only redundant in young women who have the
biological brew going for them anyway. After all, it was that biological
ferment, needing to be either suppressed or redirected along more socially
utilitarian lines, which led to the invention of the Virgin-Mother in the
first place. Granted the spectacular propensity to live without ever
really entering the cycle of sex-birth-death at all she ended up unable to
leave it except through the ingenious device of bodily assumption. But in
the days before that Capitalist-Christian narrative became firmly lodged
in our cultural heritage, the wild woman (from a more hostile perspective,
the fallen woman) created roles for herself far beyond such limitations
imposed by the female body.

Neither madonna nor
whore, she carved out her own vocation as a healer, herbalist, teacher,
tea-leaf reader, singer and seer, in the forests, in the caves, in the
wilds on the fringes of the village, in whatever territory was anathema to
society. She created her own power rather than submit to the demands of
the social machine which inscribed the boundaries of the bidden and the
forbidden.

By those standards,
Mrs. G falls short as a witch. She was a product of the social machine not
a rebel against it. The widow of Feroze Gandhi, a parliamentarian, and the
daughter of Prime Minister Nehru, she was delivered into the circles of
power in the traditional way -- by a man. First through her father who
groomed her in the memorable letters he wrote to her during his years of
imprisonment by the British (the sentimental but graceful “Discovery of
India”) and then through her husband's position. She was also always quite
shy, a trait which some -- like the socially insecure Nixon -- mistook for
haughtiness. No obvious witch material there except for the mane and the
nose. While the witches beloved of feminist iconography fly their brooms
gleefully in the face of a largely masculine power structure, Indira ruled
completely through that structure. The political bosses who embraced her
believing she would be putty in their hands soon found that she was one of
those women with the “heart and stomach of a king.” Her supposed
masculinity of style in fact became so much a cheap target for critics
that when a masala biography came out with details of a few sexual
affairs, some fans forgave the prurience out of relief at discovering that
she did have female gonads after all. Your true witch -- however ugly and
shriveled -- never really leaves that in doubt.

My first thought
then was that the imperial wizard of American political nastiness got it
wrong about Indira and India. But on second thoughts perhaps not. What
failed to endear Indians to Nixon, a quality he labeled “deviousness”, has
enough in common with witchcraft and bastardy to make me think that he was
onto something although the label is a indisputably a supreme case of
kettle-phobia from one of the grimier pots on the political range.
Actually, with his shadowed eyes and long nose, Nixon was himself as good
a poster-boy for the black arts as anyone.

And so perhaps he of
all people did know whereof he spoke.

To be devious is
after all also to be deviant, transgressive, in that post-modern French
philosophical way. It is to defy the expected, the normative. Witches,
bastards, and the devious are all deviants, playing foot-loose with the
expected order of things. A witch is outside the normal world precisely
because she is female and powerful in a world where femininity is expected
to align with the passive and the pliant and feminine morality is always
the Christian virtue of denial and humility -- the virtues of the weak --
and never the pre-Christian “virtue” of discipline and mastery -- the
virtues of the strong.

Witches, bastards,
and the devious/deviants defy the norm, but it seems that Pakistanis,
“straightforward but stupid,” define it. Since Pakistanis are racially no
different from Indians, however, the difference Nixon sensed was not
racial at all but cultural. It was not Pakistanis but Pakistani military
culture that put him at ease. And why not? Which imperial masters would
not be comfortable with satraps twice as patriarchal and militaristic than
themselves? It was the clear-cut hyper-masculine authoritarianism of the
military juntas, proxies for the West, to which Nixon responded in Paki-stan
-- the land of the pure -- and whose lack made him so uncomfortable in the
impure land of bastardy and witchcraft. Whatever Mrs. G. was and wasn't,
despite bride-burning and female feticide, large tracts of Indian culture
has always been and will be under the rule of the goddess. Hinduism
dissolves the subject-object rigidities of the male-on-top logos and
promotes the fluid, deviant intelligence of the feminine. Women may
conform to the puritan mores of Victorianized India in the Sankritizing
classes, but the lowest and highest orders preserve the old folkways of
bitchery and witchery.

You only have to
watch the village women of India at work in the morning to discover this
-- the seamless work that starts from the pre-dawn trek to the well some
mile or two away and ends late at night squatting over the fire outside a
hut while her mate idles outside the toddy shop, beedi-smoke curling up
from his hand. Oppression, exploitation, yes. But at the same time,
emancipation as well. The women are dressed for working, not for ogling by
men; no demureness, none of the coy ritual of the fertility game; they
shout and curse freely at the well, splashing lascivious epithets at each
other like the colored water thrown at Holi. Betrayed by the male, they
are also freer of the male than their middle-class sisters. These
emaciated, emancipated, tough, toiling women have unconsciously proved
what women on welfare in America are finding. They can raise their
children alone. Both defy the ubiquitous gaze of the male.

But there is a
difference between bastardy inside the imperial state and outside that is
crucial. In the imperial state, the missing father is replaced by the
state. Outside imperium, that is not yet the case.

In the imperium even
those who do have a father end up overshadowed by the hyper-masculinized
image created, manipulated, and projected by the imperial state. Under its
domination, the hyper-masculine father cripples the growth of his child,
either turning him into a replica of himself or a pale, emasculated
shadow.

The hyper-masculine
male is both beneficiary and sacrificial victim of the imperial machine
which employs him as soldier, sailor, beggar-man, and thief as it suits
its purposes. We talk of the nanny-state but really it's the Daddy-State,
the substitution of organic, biological fatherhood with the robotic state.
The Daddy State teaches its progeny well -- through the mythologizing of
sports, war, and crime -- the three horsemen of the imperial apocalypse.
In video games and films, the cult of violence of the Daddy-State reigns
-- children of all classes slouch around in the baggy, beltless trousers
of prisoners to the phallic throb of rap, the soul music of the ghetto
war-zones where the unofficial violence of the underclass plays out; their
older siblings wear army camouflage and olive drab and their parents
cruise the highways in sports utility vehicles and the military's own
Hummer, celebrating the official violence of the overclass. Roughly a
third or more of the American economy depends on the prison-military
complex. Whole sections of the populace are imprisoned at rates second
only to China in the world while other sections profit from the jobs that
accompany the growth of the complex. In America, there can be no true
bastards or true witches under the all-seeing eye of the Daddy-State.

Mrs. G also might be
no true witch, but in some sense, by resisting the bipolar Cold War logic
of us-against-them, she stopped being Daddy's girl. Insider she was, but
also in many ways an outsider. An un-intellectual, pragmatic woman whom
the intellectual elites of India looked down on; a student at
Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's unorthodox school of indigenous
learning, and a woman who never took a degree at Oxford, who yet went on
to lead a country that reveres formal education; a logical woman who
followed the astrological dictates of the Rasputin-like yogi Dhirendra
Brahmachari; a shy, tubercular girl who grew up to outwit the generals of
Pakistan, conduct a bloody siege of a holy shrine, and throw princesses
into jail, all the while boasting that she herself was India and India
she. She became in some imaginations, Durga, the all-powerful goddess,
invincible nature, blowing up the brittle creations of impudent men.

But Mrs. G's
witchery was limited and ultimately too entangled in the machinery of the
state to transfigure it in any way. The real witch of India was not Mrs. G
but Mahatma-ji, the androgynous father of India. In his old age, Bapu
(daddy), as he was known, strove to actualize in his own body the feminine
principle. The episodes in which he slept naked next to his young nieces
were notoriously misunderstood even by the brilliant mind of Arthur
Koestler who wrote in The Yogi and the Commissar his iconoclastic
book on Gandhi, that “it took a lot of derring-do to keep Bapu in
chastity.” But conventional chastity is still entangled in the binary
logic of either/or. What Gandhi was engaged in was not some kind of
testing of chastity; neither was he, as his detractors claimed, simply a
“dirty-old man” although a longing for simple physical affection may well
have been the psychological motivation for the old man after the death of
his wife, Kasturba. He was actually practicing the ancient witchcraft called
tantra. Legions of popular sex-manuals have reduced this complex system of
harnessing life-energy to a quick fix for bored couples. But between
California tantra and the real thing lies the world of difference between
genital pyrotechnics and body-mind wisdom. What Gandhi was doing was
recreating himself as an androgyne beyond the binary logic of male and
female. He was in search of siddhis, magical powers, available only
to spiritual adepts.

Gandhi was convinced that his own inner
world was connected subtly with the external world and that a failure of
control in one would be reflected in a failure in the other. Over and over
again, for instance during massive rioting in Noakhali in East Bengal, he
blamed political failure on the failure of his own will. Witchery indeed.
What a refutation of the state to imagine a politics of one, conducted
within one's own body and imagination. What heresy against the religion of
the state to display power as a naked body. Naked not merely physically
but morally. Gandhian transparence -- the subject of “My Experiments with
Truth” -- when contrasted with the Machiavellianism of the modern state,
may look like nothing more than deviance, but it's a deviant wisdom that
foils the zero-sum game of power-politics.

Whatever we think of
the rationality or success or even the subconscious motivations of this
politics of the demasculinized male and practitioner of witchcraft, when
all is said and done it remains perhaps the most successful and admired
alternative to the violent state in the last century. It was because of
Gandhi that civil disobedience and non-violent resistance became the
weapons of the Civil Rights Movement in the US. It was out of Gandhianism
that the concept of sustainable development emerged. Even Gandhi's harsh
puritanism about sex should be understood on its own terms for what it
was, not anti-feminist but a way to remove women from the hierarchical
male gaze that would reduce them to sexual objects.

Gandhianism has been
the most effective counter to the view pervasive from Machiavelli to Marx
that the end justifies the means and that the Realpolitik of statecraft
demands that morality be put aside. Gandhi's witchcraft denies this
special treatment of the state; for it, ends are inextricably tied with
means. Rather than allowing the individual to be erased in the mass,
Gandhianism at every level tries to place the most sentient unit of
society at the center: the individual and the local community.

Gandhi's atavistic
vision of self-sufficient villages and the harnessing of intellect to the
spiritual growth of the individual rather than to industrial technology
may have sounded like Luddism during the orgy of state violence in the
mid-century but they have a strange futuristic relevance as quantum
physics unveils a physical universe closely aligned and even inseparable
from the psyche. The newest technology -- nanotechnology -- is an
anti-technology that returns the human being again to the center of things
and reinforces the deviant logic of mutuality, complementarity, and
personal power rather than authoritarianism, competition, and the mass
mind as the organizing principles of society.

When the CIA turns
to “remote viewing” (psychic visualization) to conduct its operations,
Gandhi's tantric politics sheds its quaintness. Beyond the global
Daddy-state, as New Age physics and technology increasingly validate
ancient Eastern ideas of nature and psyche, the witches and bastards of
post-colonial India may well offer the most viable template for the
development of anti-authoritarian non-violent communities that return
human beings to their own personal power.

And so it could well
turn out that the imperial wizard's insult in the end may contain the most
potent recipe we have today for anti-imperialism.

Lila Rajiva
is a freelance writer based in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author of
The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the US Media(Monthly
Review Press, 2005).
She has taught music at the Peabody Preparatory, and English and Politics
at the University of Maryland and Towson University. She can be reached
at:
lrajiva@hotmail.com. Copyright (c) 2005 by Lila Rajiva